Of course there was more to it, but the stress of the insecurity in his job was most definitely a factor. He had already been through the collapse of Ansett, was basically unemployable elsewhere as he had no current, applicable experience and at 45 seemed to have no decent career prospects.
Also irrelevant to the purpose of the post- Cerbus wrote that coming to EK would be a come down for any QANTAS pilot- that is clearly, simply untrue. It has been a career dead end for over a decade.